ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 explores practices that seek to remake the past in the present, whether in architectural and landscape form, as in open-air museums, or rebuilding projects, and in re-enactments and immersive environments such as panoramas. These sometimes relate to top-down appeals to citizens to cultivate attachments to particular pasts and to model a sense of self-in-history that is auxiliary to political identities. In less overtly governmental settings, people who feel embattled or alienated by social change may use heritage to exercise a desire to revert to imagined cultural worlds. ‘Reversions’ is a way of thinking about the process of looking to the past to find alternative futures that put back in place what has been lost, while its secondary meaning – making successive versions – speaks to creative and plural imaginings of the past.
